Photography As Art: Part 3_Entry 2_Week 19

“…Many painters valued photography- but chiefly as a tool, useful to supply an image for an artist to work from in constructing a painting” (Orvell, 81). From the mid- to late nineteenth century, artists would use the view through the camera lens to mirror an image and to paint over the scene. The art of painting eventually broke away from realism and evolved into forms of Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstraction. Photography has been influenced by stylistic changes in painting as well as by independent inspirations (Orvell, 81-82).

            For one French painter, Paul Delaroche, he considered the art of painting to be lost since the aid of the camera to paint pictures. “From today, painting is dead,” he declared (Orvell, 81). On the contrary, photographer Alfred Stieglitz believed that photography was merely another form of art. He had a “desire to elevate photography to the level of the fine arts, combined with a belief in the democratic potential of the medium to reach out beyond the single print to a larger audience” (Orvell, 87). Stieglitz founded the Camera Work, a magazine that argued his belief that “photography should stand among the other arts an equal, publishing… the work of the major Pictorialists who were part of his own exclusive Photo- Secessionist circle, along with the work of the new French painters and sculptors whose Cubist innovations were changing the nature of art” (Orvell, 87).

It was only after the turn of the century that photography began to breach the walls of the gallery and museum world in America, and even then with limited success. Now, however, photographs can sell for six figures — not in the same league as the millions for a Van Gogh painting, but not exactly chump change either — and be presented in fine art museums, not industrial expositions (Olsen, 1). 

Works Cited

Beckman, Tad. “Photography as Art.” HMC. Harvey Mudd College, 24   Nov. 2004. Web. 26 Sep. 2012.

Olsen, Chuck. “American Photography- A Century of Images: Art.”    KNPB. Kodak, CPB, PBS, National Endowment for the Arts,    The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and the   George Gun    Foundation. Web. 26 Sep. 2012.

Orvell, Miles. American Photography. Oxford: Oxford University     Press, 2003. Print.

The New Webster’s Library of Practical Information. New York: Lexicon Publications, Inc., 1990. Print.

Thripp, Richard. “10 Reasons Why Photography Sucks and Isn’t an    Art Form.” Thripp Photography. Richard Thripp, 20 June   2008. Web. 26 Sep. 2012.